The chairmen of the U.S. House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance committees want to phase out the way Medicare pays doctors for their services. They're proposing a gradual change to a new system along with a pay freeze and incentives to give up fee-for-service billing. "Enough with the quick fixes. Our proposal is for a new physician payment system that rewards value over volume," Senator Max Baucus of Montana said in a statement. "It will go a long way in improving the efficiency and quality of care for America's seniors."
A senior House of Representatives lawmaker subpoenaed Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for documents related to the troubled launch of the Obamacare website, HealthCare.gov, his office said on Thursday. Representative Darrell Issa, Republican chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, announced he had subpoenaed Sebelius for information he and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander have sought since October 10. The documents they want to see relate to the website's technical problems, how it was tested and the number of people who have enrolled in healthcare exchanges through the site, as well as the number who have attempted to enroll.
Carolyn Senger, a preventive medicine doctor, regularly treats uninsured patients, coaching them how to stay healthy. Now she's teaching them something else: how to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. "Not only can I help you with your health, but I can also help you get some coverage," Senger tells her patients. In a massive push to get millions signed up for new insurance options over the next several months, health officials are counting on physicians. They're motivated by a long-standing principle: People trust their doctors.
Team Obamacare is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of essentially frozen assets — yet another consequence of the failed launch of healthcare.gov. There's no point in an ad blitz directing people to sign up on a website that doesn't work. And while advocacy groups say they had always planned to spend more money on the back end to boost enrollment in lagging states at the end of this year and early next year, they didn't count on the opening month fizzle. The website bomb is more than just an inconvenience for the groups, stocked with people who have been working for years to ensure that insurance is available to all Americans.
The hundreds of thousands of Americans whose individual insurance policies will be canceled as Obamacare takes full effect next year are experiencing a disruptive element of healthcare reform, the head of health insurer Cigna said on Thursday. In the past week, reports of pending plan cancellations have become a political problem for President Barack Obama, who promised years ago as he was pushing to pass the healthcare law that Americans who liked their health plans could keep them. While that remains true for most people with insurance, a small percentage of the 17 million Americans with individual policies are now getting notice that they will terminate next year because they do not comply with new benefits required by Obamacare.
Thirty-one percent of physicians said in a 2011 survey that they were exchanging patient clinical summaries with other providers, according to a paper recently published in the American Journal of Managed Care. Fifty-five percent of respondents had the computerized capability to send prescriptions electronically; 67% could view lab results electronically; 42% were able to incorporate lab results in their electronic health record (EHR) system; and 35% were able to send lab orders electronically. Researchers at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) did the analysis based on data from the 2011 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) Electronic Medical Record Supplement.